Turnbull's digital tsar picks Google cloud

The Digital Transformation Office has gone live with Google Apps, supported by Dialog IT.

The new federal government agency will use Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Gmail, among other Google tools. Supplier Dialog IT, headquartered in Brisbane, was chosen from the Department of Finance's Cloud Service Panel.

Unclassified documents will be stored in Google Drive, which a DTO spokesperson said offered "robust security, with a two-factor authentication logon mandated for DTO users, and Google Drive encryption. Classified documents are stored within the DTO's protected-level IT environment."

DTO staff will access the Google suite using a device mix of Windows 7 desktops, Windows 8.1 and Mac laptops, iPhones and Android devices.

The decision to go Google comes after the DTO appointed Paul Shetler as its chief executive in July. On his appointment, Shetler told Fairfax Media that he wanted public services to be more like Uber, Airbnb and Amazon.

Before moving to Australia to head up the DTO, Shetler was an executive in the UK Government Digital Service and the chief digital officer for the UK Ministry of Justice. His private sector roles included senior positions at Oracle and Microsoft.

Dialog IT's national Google practice manager, Glenn Irvine, told CRN that the implementation was "done very quickly, the minute Paul Shetler hit the deck".

As a new agency, the Google Apps implementation was a greenfield project. "We put it up in the space of a week."

Irvine hopes bigger agencies will now be tempted to follow the DTO's lead. He told CRN that big Google migrations are "the Holy Grail for us".

Beyond the edge security "baked into Google", Dialog could bolster security using third-party tools such as Adallom and CloudLock, said Irvine. This kind of additional security technology is already live with some of Dialog's other public sector accounts; 60 percent of Dialog's client base is in government.

One of its government clients can identify and stop files being uploaded to the cloud based on particular number formats found with documents, such as identifiers for confidential case records, Irvine said.

The DTO deployment only covers about 160 seats, a small number for a government rollout, but Irvine hopes it will be a strategic win that leads to further projects, given the DTO's role in guiding government policy around digital technology and the internet.

In the 2015-16 Federal Budget, the DTO was allocated $254.7 million to deliver on a broad digital promise for government agencies, ensuring "all new and redesigned services are designed consistently and will be simpler and easier to use" and improving the quality of online interactions with government.